One of the biggest problems in today’s education is the amount of stress it causes for students. Not only are students forced to go to school from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, they also get anywhere from an hour to three hours of homework. Most students have a social life outside of school. Some students are in sports. Not every single student has the time or patience to do that much homework every night. Not to mention most teachers don’t know what a student has going on in their personal life outside of school. Some students go home to a hostile environment, some have major family problems. Teachers just don’t know. Even if one teacher only gives about ten minutes of homework, there’s still six other classes a student has to go through. Hypothetically, if every teacher only gave ten minutes of homework a night, that’s still seventy minutes of homework a night.

Another big problem with the education system is that we, as a student body, never get taught what we’re going to use in the real world or when we’re adults. How many classes have you been in that have taught you how to calculate your taxes? How many classes have you been in that have taught you what Social Security is? How many classes have taught you how to prepare a resumé for an interview? Not many classes in high school that teach you any of these. Does BC Calculus teach you to do your taxes? No. Does Calculus help you prepare a resume? No. Does Chemistry teach you how to do your taxes? No. The point is, almost no class here teaches you what you’ll actually use when you’re an adult. Honestly, the only two classes I’ve personally ever been in that have taught me what I’ll someday use are Consumer Math and Family Consumer Science. Consumer Math has taught me how to calculate taxes from my paycheck, including Social Security, Medicare, state, and local taxes. Family Consumer Science has taught me many valuable lessons that I know one day, when I’m an adult, I’ll be using in my daily life. It’s taught me how to make a resumé and what to do in an interview, along with so many other valuable skills. Has any other class taught you that? But let’s all just be glad that we can find the square root of x divided by nineteen to the nth root, right?

School lunch. Although that’s all that needs to be said, I’ll keep going. How many students actually like most school lunches? We have all seen that uncooked sausage on Twitter. No student can go through the remainder of the school day when they’re starving because they can’t focus. The lack of taste in school lunch and the lack of ability to “cook” the school lunch is ridiculous. School lunch needs to go back to what is used to be. How about a slushee machine? How about better tasting pizza? How do they expect us to be able to only use two or three sauce packets with out lunch? Let’s face it, when you use a mass amount of sauce, it tends to mask the awful taste of the “food.”

Common Core is also a part of education that needs to be taken out. There’s a saying that no two people are alike. If this is true, what makes the government really think that we, as students, all learn the same? No two students learn exactly like the other. Everyone has their strengths and everyone has their weaknesses. All Common Core does is give students even more work to do. Paper homework and projects in gym class? Ridiculous. Common Core has done nothing positive for the education system, so why do we still have it?

Something else that has recently become a problem in schools throughout America is cheating. Some blame it on the advancement of technology in society. Think about this from a student’s perspective: the choices are either fail or cheat. If you have to cheat to pass, wouldn’t you do it, too? Too often, students are labeled and judged by their grades. Like Albert Einstein once said, “Everyone is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will go its whole life believing it is stupid.”

I think it’s safe to say that in order for us as a country and as a student body to be well educated, the United States government must stay out of all aspects of education. It’s our education, not the government’s education.